We produce monthly data research reports that we send to leads and contacts based on industry.

Often, reports will be relevant to multiple industries as well as accounts that may be in an industry that could be considered irrelevant.

Hypothetical Example: Report on Healthy Living goes to Retail industry (but not all retailers apply) and some Food and Beverage Industry (but not all apply - ie junk food maybe). Currently we are manually picking companies to be included which takes forever.

So we are thinking of making Marketing Groups, which are checkbox fields, the idea of Multi-select picklists also came up.

So an example would be a Fitness Group which includes select retailers, select food and beverage, select manufacturers etc. And then there would be Home and Garden, Travel and Travel Related. And then specific ad agencies.

Now, sales operations wants to make those fields on the account object, so when new contacts are added to each account they automatically inherit the marketing groups. But some of the downsides are that sales can't really adjust marketing groups at the contact level and I can't really do operations in Marketo without salesforce workflows etc.

I would like to have the marketing groups on the contact object so I can have more control with Marketo and sales can pick and choose who to suppress, however the issue of new contacts added to existing accounts keeps coming up.

Which method is better? Or how would you solve for this? Any advice appreciated!

So our industry field currently is pretty general, I suppose we could make it more granular, but the team is set on this marketing group option.

What are you referring to when you say "list of companies" at account level?

And I was thinking, if the checkbox for the marketing group is on the contact object, then sales could pick and choose which contacts at each company would qualify to receive the reports. Kind of a spin on "marketing suspend", you know what I mean?

I would rather choose a multi select field. The reason is that the list of values will probably evolve over time and it's easier to add values to a field than permanently create checkboxes. I would create that field in SFDC and let it sync to Marketo.

With regards to the account vs contact object, it's really a hard one and mainly a UX issue as in any case account data from SFDC can be used in Marketo for targeting. One thing to always remember is that account fields can only be edited on SFDC side. Meaning that if you choose an account field, you will not be able to offer a preference center where visitors would be able to change their preferences.

As Josh said, you can use some SFDC techniques to propagate info from one contact to others, but if you have 2 contacts with various preferences and you create 3rd one, how are you going to manage it?

At the end of the day, I would probably create an "account preferences" account field + a contact field in SFDC, together with an SFDC or Marketo workflow that copy it's values to new contacts, if the contact field is empty. But I would finally manage the real infos and targeting in the contact multi-valued field. So 2 fields (contact and account) and a workflow.